History and political development
From a splinter group of the Workers' Party, the party was founded by former WP Assistant Secretary-General Seow Khee Leng on 16 March 1973, under the name of the United Front. [2] On 5 March 1982, the party was renamed to Singapore United Front, to avoid confusion with the name of another party, United People's Front.
During the campaigning in the 1984 general election, SUF chief Seow was sued by Lee Kuan Yew (who was then the Prime Minister of Singapore) alongside the members of People's Action Party for slandering defamatory remarks made at two rally speeches that Lee and his cabinet were guilty of corruption. [3] Seow was ordered to pay Lee and the PAP S$250,000 worth of damages and costs each, and by 3 February 1989, Seow was made bankrupt after being unable to keep up with the payments for the damages owned from two separate but similar libel suits brought by PM Lee and the PAP government. [4]
In January 1988, the party merged with the WP to contest the 1988 general election. SUF was temporarily defunct until 1992, when Seow and others resigned from the WP and revived the party, renaming it to its current name, the Democratic Progressive Party. [5]
Former WP member Tan Soo Phuan and his son Tan Lead Shake stood as candidates for the party in the 1997 and 2001 general elections. They did not achieve much electoral success, as both saw the candidates losing their electoral deposits for failing to garner the necessary threshold of 12.5% of the valid votes cast (Soo Phuan in the 1997 election in Chua Chu Kang SMC and Lead Shake in the 2001 election in Ayer Rajah SMC).
In July 2002, both father and son were expelled from the DPP for breaching party orders by contesting the 2001 election without informing the party first (Soo Phuan did not inform his decision to contest MacPherson SMC, while Lead Shake contested Ayer Rajah instead of Joo Chiat SMC). [6]
After more than a decade of inactivity, Seow invited a group of former members of the Singapore People's Party including Benjamin Pwee and Mohamad Hamim Bin Aliyas (a SPP founding member) to take over the leadership of the DPP in December 2012. Pwee was appointed as the party's Acting Secretary-General in January 2013. At an Ordinary Party Congress meeting held on 31 March 2013, Hamim and Pwee were officially elected as the party's Chairman and Secretary-General respectively. [7]
Pursuant to a Memorandum of Agreement signed in August 2015, Pwee and Hamim resigned from DPP to return to SPP to help their team contest Bishan–Toa Payoh Group Representation Constituency in the 2015 general election. However, the SPP team obtained only 26.41% of the valid votes. The duo returned to the DPP soon after.
In 2018, the DPP was present in a meeting with six other opposition parties, the Singaporeans First, Singapore Democratic Party, People's Power Party, National Solidarity Party and Peoples Voice, along with former PAP MP and Presidential Candidate Tan Cheng Bock, on the possibility of forming a coalition led by Tan for the next election. [8]
On 19 February 2019, Pwee revealed that he had resigned from the DPP and joined the SDP ahead of the forthcoming general election four days later. [9] Hamim took over as the new Secretary-General and leader, while Organising Secretary Ting Tze Jiang became Chairman.
In 2020, the DPP formed an alliance with the Reform Party, SingFirst and PPP. They applied to join the Singapore Democratic Alliance, but the SDA turned them down.
Although the DPP expressed their intention to contest in the 2020 Singaporean general election, on 27 June 2020, the party announced that they would not be participating and will instead back allied parties RP and PPP [10] (SingFirst dissolved before the election).
In 2023, the DPP established the People's Alliance For Reform together with the PV, RP and PPP.
